Public discourse on abortion

Research objectives: to elucidate the range of discursive events (dynamic, contradictory and constantly reproduced) emerging in a variety of public statements (from written texts to public talk) concerning abortion in South Africa; to examine how constructions of abortion have changed over time, the power relations emanating from the complex process of the multiple constructions of abortion, the prescriptive effects of these constructions regarding how women and service providers should act, and the codifying effects of what can be known about abortion and its effects.

Nature of the project: This major project, started in 2003, is on-going. The project was initially funded for five years by the National Research Foundation and is currently funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Research Focus Area. It is based in the Departments of Psychology and Politics at RU.

Methodology: Text has been, and will be, collected from public documents (newspapers, Hansard, web-sites, policy documents) and focus group discussions; critical discourse analysis has been, and will be, used to analyse the data.